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(CNN) – For the past several years China has been on a spending spree. Chinese companies are working with their government to acquire assets all over the world. Things like technology companies, banks, ports and real estate.

But last week's announcement that a Chinese meat producer had agreed to buy Virginia-based Smithfield Foods raised more than a few eyebrows. That's because Smithfield is the world's largest processor of pork, selling ham, hot dogs and bacon under popular brand names like Armor and Farmland.

University of California-Irvine economist Peter Navarro worries that deals like this one help China gain too much control over the American economy:

[1:31] “We're getting deeper and deeper into debt with a country that doesn't have our best interests at heart. This is not Canada. This is not Great Britain. It's a country which is growing the biggest military in the world to challenge us .” FULL POST

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(CNN) – Earlier this month in New York, the two renown art auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, both had record setting sales.

At Christie’s, one of Jackson Pollock’s iconic drip paintings “No. 19, 1948” was sold for $58 million, which crushed the painting's previous sale in 1993 of just $2.4 million.

Works from 12 contemporary artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat, sold for record prices. The sale of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s totaled $495 million – the highest sales figure at any art auction.

The night before Christie’s auction on May 14 was Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art. The featured work was Barnett Newman’s "Onement VI." The final price tag: $43.8 million. FULL POST

(CNN) - Last week, a fake news story got tweeted from a hacked Associate Press twitter account. Within about two minutes, the stock market sunk over 100 points, but then came back to the surface soon afterwards. An event only made possible by the speed and robotic actions of High Frequency Trading.

Much of the quick back-and-forth trading that swings the market up and down is done by computers. Thousands of trades happen every second. It's because companies have created algorithms to scour the web for information on the market and then acts on that information, in the form of automatic trading. FULL POST

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(CNN) – This week President Obama released his $3.7 trillion budget. Even though there's added spending in it, the White House argues that spending will help the economy grow. Not surprisingly, Republicans say it's not fiscally responsible.

Among the budget line items Republicans don't like is the prediction that the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, will need a $943 million bailout. Real estate and personal finance expert Ilyce Glink says that's because the FHA is required to have a capital cushion of 2 percent of its loan balances. Currently, it doesn't.

[1:34] “The problem is, with the Great Recession, the number of people who have gone into foreclosure has been huge.” FULL POST